Jim Garrison Response to NBC Hit Piece

On July 15, 1967, NBC allowed New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison to respond to an NBC program that was highly critical of Garrison's pursuit of alleged Kennedy assassination conspirators in New Orleans.

On March 1, 1967, New Orleans district attorney Jim Garrison shocked the world by arresting local businessman Clay Shaw for conspiracy to murder the president. His alleged co-conspirator, David Ferrie, had been found dead a few days before. Garrison charged that elements of the United States government, in particular the CIA, were behind the crime. From the beginning, his probe was virulently attacked in the media and violently denounced from Washington. His office was infiltrated and sabotaged, and witnesses disappeared and died strangely. Eventually, Shaw was acquitted after the briefest of jury deliberation and the only prosecution ever brought for the murder of President Kennedy was over.

Returning to print for the first time in years, On the Trail of the Assassins—the primary source material for Oliver Stone’s hit film JFK—is Garrison’s own account of his investigations into the background of Lee Harvey Oswald and the assassination of President Kennedy, and his prosecution of Clay Shaw in the trial that followed.

Working with thousands of previously unreleased documents and drawing on more than one thousand interviews, with many witnesses speaking out for the first time, Joan Mellen revisits the investigation of New Orleans district attorney Jim Garrison, the only public official to have indicted, in 1969, a suspect in President John F. Kennedy’s murder.Garrison began by exposing the contradictions in the Warren Report, which concluded that Lee Harvey Oswald was an unstable pro-Castro Marxist who acted alone in killing Kennedy. A Farewell to Justice reveals that Oswald, no Marxist, was in fact working with both the FBI and the CIA, as well as with U.S. Customs, and that the attempts to sabotage Garrison’s investigation reached the highest levels of the U.S. government. Garrison interviewed various individuals involved in the assassination, ranging from Clay Shaw and CIA contract employee David Ferrie to a Marine cohort of Oswald named Kerry Thornley, who at the very least was a Defense Intelligence Agency asset. Garrison’s suspects included CIA-sponsored soldiers of fortune enlisted in assassination attempts against Fidel Castro, an anti-Castro Cuban asset, and a young runner for the conspirators, interviewed here for the first time by the author.Building upon Garrison’s effort, Mellen uncovers decisive new evidence and clearly establishes the intelligence agencies’ roles in both a president’s assassination and its cover-up, set in motion well before the actual events of November 22, 1963.

Destiny Betrayed: JFK, Cuba, and the Garrison Case-By James DiEugenio

Twenty years after the first edition of Destiny Betrayed, DiEugenio is back with his ever-expanding investigation into the life and death of JFK. But this is no simple reissue. It is a greatly revised and expanded version of the original book, including updates on all the topics it introduced back in 1992. DiEugenio has used the declassification process of the Assassination Records Review Board (ARRB) to obtain the most current information on topics like the Garrison investigation and Clay Shaw; the newly exposed fallacies of the Warren Commission; U.S.-Cuban policy from 1957 to 1963; Kennedy's withdrawal plan from Vietnam; Kennedy's challenge to the Cold War consensus in 1961, and where those ideas originated; the ARRB medical inquiry demonstrating conspiracy and cover up; and the problems with the investigation of the Kennedy case. DiEugenio’s primary focus is on the Garrison inquiry, the New Orleans aspects of the Kennedy murder investigation, and the revelatory new information that bolsters Garrison’s case and has been withheld from the public.

All of this and more is contained in the narrative of this complex crime, with twin focuses on the victim, John F. Kennedy, and the investigator, Jim Garrison.

“One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we’ve been
bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle.
We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has
captured us. It’s simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves,
that we’ve been taken. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you
almost never get it back.”